Realism, motivation and reasons
A key objection to realism has been that it fails to explain the connection between a
moral judgement and the motivation to act. One move, adopted by the Cornell
realists, is to endorse externalism about moral motivation. The belief or judgement
alone is not enough. There needs to be an additional state – a desire – to motivate
the action. However, it can be objected that externalism relies on a
misunderstanding of what it is to understand or grasp or sincerely form or hold a
moral judgement. To understand that something is right or wrong involves a
commitment to act. Remove that commitment and there is simply a lack of
understanding or grasp of the moral concept involved. The realist can, though,
explain how the internal or necessary connection between moral judgement and
action is maintained. To put matters simply the realist can say that the Humean
Theory of Motivation presents us with an unrealistically simplistic model of moral
psychology.
The realist can allow that desire figures in an account of moral motivation, but that it
can do so in a purely formal way. This position is presented in different ways by
Thomas Nagel and John McDowell. The desire to pursue some end or bring about
some state follows from, or is unintelligible independent of, the moral beliefs of an
agent. The source of the motivation to act in the morally appropriate fashion is a
moral belief or judgement, and in having that belief the agent is motivated to act. A
more radical response is due to Jonathan Dancy. He argues that a belief alone can
motivate. In sum the realist can consistently argue that Internalism fits with
cognitivism. To the extent that anti-realism is motivated by the view that moral
judgements could not be belief states because beliefs are motivationally inert, that
motivation is undercut by this kind of realist response. Let’s see in a little more detail
what Nagel, McDowell and Dancy have to say.1
Nagel suggests a comparison between moral and prudential action where the latter
is understood as acting on the basis of one's own interests. I may act prudentially
today by taking out insurance or giving up a damaging habit such as smoking or a
dangerous activity like boxing. I am motivated by reasons concerning my future state
and welfare: I am motivated by a future reason. I am fine today; it is my self in the
future that has a reason for the insurance or undamaged body parts. Nonetheless, I
am motivated now by the content of the beliefs about the need for insurance monies
or a healthy set of lungs and so on. I conceive of myself as a person though time,
and it would be irrational to think that the mere passage of time or my temporal
location makes a difference to the reason.2 Now, if it is rational for me to act on my
future reasons, then it is also rational for me to act now on the basis of reasons other
people have.
1
See Nagel’s The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970). For McDowell’s views see his
‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Requirements?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society pp.
13-29, 1978 ‘Virtue and Reason’, The Monist pp. 331-350,1979. For Dancy see Moral Reasons
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
2 Of course, this is not to say we will always act on the reason. The motivation to do what is in my long
term interest is frequently undermined or defeated by short term considerations, but the key issue is
that there is a reason for action to be defeated.
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Well, you might ask, why? I can see myself as enduring through time from a
perspective outside of any particular point in my life (so to speak). Equally, I can
conceive of myself from an impersonal and impartial perspective so as to see myself
as one agent among a plurality of agents. From such a perspective - a view from no
particular point of view - I can see that P is causing pain to Q by standing on his foot.
Q has an interest in or reason for the removal of P's foot because of the pain it is
causing. From the impartial perspective I can say that P has a reason to remove his
foot, and because P could be anyone the reason is quite general. That P is me
means that I have a reason to act.
It is the content of the reason that motivates - or example, pain is being caused to an
innocent - not the presence of some desire. This is not to say that there is no desire
present. Nagel allows that when we are motivated to act we do also possess a
desire to act. However, my desire to remove my foot or give to famine relief is
motivated by an antecedent belief, by the recognition of the reason to act - my
standing on his foot is causing pain, mass starvation is a moral horror. In our moral
thinking such desires are motivated desires. Desires such as thirst or hunger which
overcome us are, in Nagel's terms, unmotivated.3
Drawing on Aristotle and Wittgenstein realism can hold that the moral agent
understands the world in a particular way. She is attuned or sensitive to the ways in
which actions and attitudes constitute goods or harms. In understanding the social
world in this way the agent recognises that there are in particular circumstances
certain reasons to act, and such reasons are motivating. John McDowell takes
virtuous agents to be such that moral reasons silence other reasons. A virtuous
person is sensitive to the morally salient features of a situation, bringing them under
just those concepts which in part constitute and shape the pattern of her dispositions
and character. For such a person the understanding of a situation is morally 'loaded'
and intrinsically motivating. McDowell analyses action as strictly requiring a
combination of belief and desire, but that in the moral case it is belief that leads and
desire that follows. The desire is unintelligible apart from the belief, the content of
which plays the key role in motivating the agent.
Dancy believes that neither Nagel nor McDowell is sufficiently radical. Belief alone
can motivate. I have now a belief about the world and a series of judgements about
how it could be after I have acted (counterfactual judgements Dancy takes to be
capable of being true or false). The gap between current belief and judgements
about how the world could be generates motivational force. Dancy suggests that it is
belief alone that motivates, since mere recognition of relevant reasons should be
enough for action; he sees desire as a state of being motivated (by the reasons), not
as what motivates. The suggestion is that the existence of genuinely normative and
non-natural facts be combined with the claim that recognition of these facts
motivates in its own right, in a way that is not dependent on the presence of an
independent desire.
A possible challenge to Nagel for you to think about… We can distinguish two senses of 'P has a
reason to '. First there is the explanatory sense. Here we identify the motivation that got P to act.
Second, there is the justificatory sense. In virtue of what reason is the action justified? Granting the
distinction between motivating reasons and normative reasons then one might hold that HTM is about
the former and Nagel's analysis concerned with the latter.
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